It's Christian universalism in both cases. Your average person in the midwest--descendants of people who volunteered for the Union Army at disproportionate rates despite being fresh immigrants with no horse in the race--thought that Saddam Hussain was a comic book villain holding Iraqis hostage and that, if he was overthrown, Iraq would become a democracy like Iowa. They couldn't conceive of a society where a brutal secular dictator was a local optimum.